Miss Mika (English)

There is no way to dress it up - marking is and will always be one of the biggest burdens in teaching. The other things like planning, training, meetings and emails all push themselves to the top of the to-do list - their turnarounds are short and they can’t be left. You can’t not plan your lessons, not turn up to meetings (tempting as it may sound) and the emails demand responses. So marking, despite being an incredibly valuable teaching tool, gets left to the wayside. It causes a great deal of anxiety for so many as the pile continues to grow or is something that forever needs doing. It is also one of the biggest reasons so many work well beyond 8-5 and spend so much of their holidays working instead of relaxing and recharging. It will always be a challenge, particularly if you too teach essay subjects like English but there are some tools that have helped me to avoid bringing marking home and to some extent staying if not on top of it, at least afloat. Marking codes The most mundane...

  Does the “aggressive” Woman of Colour trope lead to a generation of toothless lionesses? Women of colour have to navigate the western world with careful footing. Sidelined and stereotyped within the media and underrepresented at leadership tables, conducting herself in offices, classrooms and meetings is a difficult, political affair. Managing standing up for herself, being heard, demanding a seat at the table all the while not being deemed too aggressive, requires strategizing but at what cost? Surely this lack of freedom to express herself honestly and fully has detrimental effects on her confidence, self worth and identity as a whole?  Blog post for Diverse Ed

  4 outdated teaching trends we need to ditch  - tes article There are so many aspects of teaching that are time- and labour-intensive: it comes with the job. And when we’re told that these aspects are “good practice” that will lead to progress, it seems reasonable to invest hours and effort into them, no matter what. 

  An article for Teach Secondary on the benefits and pitfalls of collaborative resources and how we can best use them. Pre-made teaching resources and lesson activities – A shared blessing or collective curse?

There is no denying that for a lot of us, the last academic year was tough, possibly the toughest of many of our careers. But now we’re on the cusp of a new start, it’s worth reflecting on the lessons learned from the challenges the pandemic brought and how they can prove useful going forward. The Coronavirus pandemic has meant teachers have been running all over school sites hopping from classroom to classroom, dragging all our resources around with us, frantically logging into computers, confining our teaching to 2m distanced boxes at the front, juggling the needs of the audiences in front of us as well as the remote ones while still formatively assessing, ensuring pupil progress and keeping top of marking. And on top of all that, there was avoiding staff rooms due to limited numbers, lack of face to face contact with our teams and the horror that was TAGS. However, while much (no, most) of it was awful, through difficulty we build strength; here are my six positive takeaways from co...

My post for Diverse Educaters on the need to diversify our curricula and show students real reflections of themselves in the stories we tell: Diversification: more than an educational token

An article for tes on how to make the best of lesson observations now they're coming back post lockdown learning. How to handle the return of lesson observations - tes

This is a lesson I made on redacted poetry to get students to really think about the choices writers make about the words they use. This is based on the erasure poetry of Isobel O'Hare on the #MeToo movement. I find students struggle to explain the effects of writer's methods because they can't articulate or even consider something as simple as word choice, much less more complex techniques. This lesson was to address this and really get them thinking about what a writer is saying both overtly and in the subtext of their writing, why they are conveying it the way they are and how their words hold power. The lesson starts with a clearly forced and insincere apology and get students to think about its subtext and why it may not be sincere: Then I teach some context about the #MeToo movement. Now, because they really need to think about the word choice and the power of words, I show how the poet transformed Weinstein’s 'apology' into a redacted poem. We talk abou...

Over the last few years, what we see and what we expect to see in the classroom has massively changed. We’ve gone from super-pacey, four-part, not-too-much-teacher-talkey lessons, to progress for the long haul, repeated learning and in-depth modelling. This is much more a shift in mentality than it is just methodology and thankfully, the same can be said for differentiation. But it is still something so easy to get wrong! Despite all the controversy that comes with differentiation, with high challenge and upward scaffolding, the glass ceilings once put in place with it, can still be shattered for the wide range of students our classrooms hold. While the transformation of what we know as differentiation is in no way complete, we can still adapt during its transition to something better - it is just a case of reassessing how we are differentiating and why. The past life of differentiation Previously, the suggestions and perhaps expectations of differentiation were planning using “All, mo...

Is dual coding the new VAK? My first Edu-article for @TeachSecondary   on the difficulties of keeping up with and implementing the latest research into everyday teaching.   Educational research – The problem with this “pedagogical minefield”

The mixed vs set ability debate is not a new one. It has gone round the houses, done its laps and the research and general consensus seem to have settled quite firmly in favour of blended classes. So why write about it now?   Mainly because I (like many on the other side of the debate) was completely and utterly against the introduction of mixed ability classes when it was first discussed in our department. Many of the titular misconceptions were my own but having now researched, taught the classes and reaped the benefits fully mixed sets bring, I have deserted post and I am firmly in the mixed ability camp. Here’s what I thought versus what I found:  1. Differentiation and Challenge is too difficult  For context, our previous configuration was to have two top sets on each side of the year with rest in mixed classes, so from my prior experience, going fully mixed would have been extra work for the teachers while taking away specific focus on learners’ needs. But how ...